Posted
by
ScuttleMonkeyon Wednesday May 16, 2007 @06:25PM
from the solid-gold-stock-tips-buy-buy-buy dept.

drhamad writes "Apple stock dropped 2.2% today in mid-afternoon trading as Engadget published news based on a faked e-mail inside Apple. 'Apparently an internal memo was sent to several Apple employees--and forwarded to Engadget--around 9am CT today saying that Apple issued a press release with the news that the iPhone was now scheduled for October, and Leopard was delayed until January. About an hour and a half after that e-mail went out, a second e-mail was sent--this time officially from Apple--saying the first e-mail was a fake, and that the delivery schedule for the iPhone and Leopard had not changed.'"

Generally, a newspaper or journalist wouldn't just giddily publish something like this without a little old-fashioned fact checking. It's idiotic to publish this with information from only a single source.
Oh, but wait... this is Web 2.0 isn't it... screw the facts... gimme page hits.

Went down from $108.48 to $103.42 mostly on account of this news. Sure, they should have bought at $105, or even smeared Apple down, last week. But hindsight is 20/20. They lost a legitimate opportunity last week and made themselves an illegitimate one.

While it is debatable as to whether Apple is too secretive for its own good, there is no denying that the company utilises rumour to build hype for its products through news blogs such appleinsider and thinksecret. The thing is about a rumour (that some people may forget) is that it can be both positive and negative for the subject in question. Sometimes rumours can backfire and this is just purely an instance of the Apple rumour mill NOT working in the company's favour.

Tom Clancy details a variation on this in one of his books: if you suspect you have a leak, you draw up a document which is a mix of truth and plausible lies which is interesting, will largely congeal with what the mole's handlers already know, and includes lurid phrasing at several locations. Then you leak N copies of that memo to your N possible leaks, and listen for what combinations of key phrases (or, not quite as easily, key facts) make it into unapproved channels. For example, you might embed twenty-five key phrases in a document about (hypothetical) insurgent activity in Iraq, and then if the New York Times quotes a briefing as saying that "Baghdad will be covered in rivers of blood" (given to 4 suspects) and that the military fears "total strategic defeat not just in Iraq but elsewhere" (given to 8 suspects) then the intersection of the two sets identifies the leak.